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JD Meier from the Prescriptive Architecture Guidance Group (aka PAG) at Microsoft stopped by my office this morning to show me the new Guidance Explorer tool he has been working on. This is a cool WinForms client application that aggregates PAG guidance and suggestions, and allows you to search and sort across it. This makes it ideal for quickly reviewing checklists of suggestions for ASP.NET projects. Each guidance rule covers why it should be followed, and includes instructions on how to implement it.

Earlier this year I posted twolong data access tutorial posts. My goal was to then follow up these popular posts (90,000+ views and counting!) with a whole series around them. Unfortunately work sidetracked me and I found I didn't have the time to-do them justice...

I've blogged a few times about LINQ and DLINQ over the last few weeks (and will be blogging a lot more about them in the future). You can read my overview post on LINQ here, and my introduction to DLINQ with ASP.NET here.

One of the new extensibility features in ASP.NET 2.0 is the ability to override and customize how page viewstate is stored and persisted. With ASP.NET V1.x, viewstate is always stored in a hidden field within the ASP.NET page, and doesn't expose an easy way to place it elsewhere. With ASP.NET V2.0 you can optionally choose to store it anywhere. A built-in SessionPageStatePersister is even included built-in to the product if you want to store it on the server in session state.

Frans Bouma is the creator of the very popular LLBLGen Pro O/R mapper for .NET. He just posted a nice walkthrough showing how to use the new version of LLBLGen (which includes some really nice new ASP.NET datasource controls for UI binding) to perform the same scenario I showed in my DLINQ post last weekend.

At TechEd this week Microsoft is going to be showing off the new VS 2005 Team Edition for Database Professional tool which is now part of the Visual Studio Team System line of products. You can learn more about it here. The first CTP build will be available to MSDN subscribers on June 11th.

ASP.NET User Controls (those files with the .ascx extensions) provide a really easy way to encapsulate functionality within an application, and allow it to be re-used across multiple pages and projects (note: for a tutorial on how to create re-usable user control libraries with the VS 2005 Web Application Project check out the C# one here, and the VB one here).